Not as, in
antiquity, at highest festival of Egypt, the noisome skeleton of death
was sent on exhibition to the revelers, for zest and shadow to the
occasion's joy and light--but as the marble statue of the normal
Greeks at Elis, suggesting death in the form of a beautiful and
perfect young man, with closed eyes, leaning on an inverted
torch--emblem of rest and aspiration after action--of crown and point
which all lives and poems should steadily have reference to, namely,
the justified and noble termination of our identity, this grade of it,
and outlet-preparation to another grade.
[34] Namely, a character, making most of common and normal elements,
to the superstructure of which not only the precious accumulations of
the learning and experiences of the Old World, and the settled
social and municipal necessities and current requirements, so long
a-building, shall still faithfully contribute, but which at its
foundations and carried up thence, and receiving its impetus from the
democratic spirit, and accepting its gauge in all departments from
the democratic formulas, shall again directly be vitalized by the
perennial influences of Nature at first hand, and the old heroic
stamina of Nature, the strong air of prairie and mountain, the dash of
the briny sea, the primary antiseptics--of the passions, in all their
fullest heat and potency, of courage, rankness, amativeness, and
of immense pride. Not to lose at all, therefore, the benefits of
artificial progress and civilization, but to re-occupy for Western
tenancy the oldest though ever-fresh fields, and reap from them the
savage and sane nourishment indispensable to a hardy nation, and the
absence of which, threatening to become worse and worse, is the most
serious lack and defect to-day of our New World literature.
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